Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-10
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The accelerating pace of climate change has transformed environmental governance from a peripheral concern into one of the most consequential axes of global political economy. For no country is this transformation more significant — or more structurally complex — than China. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously one of its most dynamic economies in renewable energy investment, China occupies a paradoxical position in the international climate order. It is at once the central problem and a potential central solution. Understanding how Beijing navigates the tension between its developmental imperatives, its authoritarian governance architecture, and its increasingly ambitious climate commitments has become essential not only to climate science and policy, but to the broader study of how state capitalism adapts under conditions of ecological constraint. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, engages precisely this terrain — examining the interplay of transition, governance, and market as the three constitutive dimensions of China's evolving climate policy framework.
China's climate commitments, most visibly encapsulated in its pledge to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, represent a significant structural shift in how the Chinese state conceptualizes its developmental trajectory. For decades, the prevailing logic of Chinese political economy prioritized gross domestic product growth above virtually all other indicators, with local officials rewarded through a cadre evaluation system that placed heavy emphasis on economic output. Climate governance necessarily disrupts this logic. The article's contribution lies in tracing how the Chinese central government has attempted to reconfigure these institutional incentives — extending the evaluation criteria for local officials to include environmental performance metrics, establishing emissions trading schemes, and deploying administrative mandates that cut across traditional sectoral and jurisdictional boundaries. This is not simply a technocratic adjustment; it represents an attempt to fundamentally restructure the incentive architecture of a vast bureaucratic apparatus while maintaining the Communist Party's monopoly on political authority and its capacity for centralized direction.
The governance dimension of China's climate transition is particularly revealing of the tensions inherent in the country's political economy. China's approach to climate governance reflects what scholars have termed "fragmented authoritarianism" — a system in which policy implementation is mediated through multiple bureaucratic layers, each with their own interests and informational constraints. The central government may issue ambitious emissions targets, but the actual achievement of those targets depends on the compliance of provincial and municipal governments that have historically been reluctant to sacrifice local industrial interests. What is analytically significant is the degree to which climate policy has become a domain in which the central state is experimenting with new tools of governance — including market-based instruments such as the national emissions trading system launched in 2021, as well as enhanced monitoring and verification technologies — precisely because older administrative command-and-control mechanisms have proven insufficient. The relationship between market instruments and state authority in this context is not one of opposition but of complementarity: markets are deployed strategically by the state as mechanisms of governance rather than as alternatives to it.
The market dimension of China's climate policy opens onto broader questions about the global political economy of the green transition. China has positioned itself as the dominant global supplier of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and battery technology — a strategic convergence of industrial policy, state financing, and climate ambition that has no clear parallel in any other major economy. This positioning carries significant implications for how the international community understands China's climate commitments. Critics in Europe and North America have argued that Chinese industrial subsidies constitute unfair trade practices; defenders counter that the rapid reduction in the global cost of renewable energy technology — driven overwhelmingly by Chinese manufacturing scale — has been one of the most consequential contributions to the global energy transition in recent history. The article's engagement with this tension reflects a broader scholarly debate about whether China's climate-industrial strategy represents a form of green developmental nationalism, a genuine commitment to decarbonization, or some unstable combination of both. These are not merely academic distinctions; they shape international negotiations, trade disputes, and the political feasibility of technology transfer to the Global South.
The research significance of work in this space extends well beyond the study of China per se. For scholars of ODA and development, China's experience raises urgent questions about whether the developmental state model — long associated with East Asian economic miracles — can be adapted to meet the demands of a low-carbon transition, and with what political consequences. China's bilateral climate financing through institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and its Belt and Road Initiative has introduced new actors and logics into international climate governance, challenging the normative frameworks established by the OECD Development Assistance Committee and complicating neat distinctions between donor and recipient countries. For civil society researchers, the near-total absence of independent environmental advocacy in China's domestic governance architecture — a consequence of the state's systematic suppression of autonomous civic organizations — raises questions about the conditions under which effective climate governance is possible, and whether participatory mechanisms that Western models treat as prerequisites can in fact be substituted by alternative forms of state capacity.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate governance will be shaped by a set of interlocking pressures that are likely to intensify over the coming decade. Domestically, the structural transformation away from heavy industry toward services and high-technology manufacturing carries both opportunities and risks for emissions trajectories, while energy security concerns — sharpened by geopolitical tensions with the United States and its allies — create powerful incentives to accelerate the buildout of domestic renewable capacity. Internationally, China will face growing pressure to demonstrate not only that it is meeting its own emissions targets but that its overseas financing activities are consistent with Paris Agreement temperature goals. For practitioners in the ODA and development space, and for researchers at institutions like IOCSS that track the intersection of global political economy and civil society, the unfolding of China's climate governance experiment offers a critical test case. It will help determine whether large-scale state-directed decarbonization is achievable outside of democratic institutional frameworks, and what the consequences of that answer are for the international order that must, in any scenario, cooperate if the worst outcomes of climate change are to be avoided.